The Truth About Blue and Yellow
by Nenena
Summary: Two short ficlets about Liz and Patti. In which Liz asks Kid about the color of a soul, and Patti appreciates the color that everyone else takes for granted.


**The Truth About Blue and Yellow**

Written for the _Soul Eater _livejournal prompt community, **42_souls**.

Pairing: Kid/Liz/Patti. Prompts: Blue and Yellow, of course.

A/N: I apologize for not keeping up with my 42_souls fics, or at least not posting them in a timely manner. ^^;; For the record, I have two big "batch" fics currently sitting on my hard drive and being revised. Hopefully I can post them soon. Anyway, here are two short fics that ended up not fitting in well with the other batches that I'm working on… But I think they work pretty well together. Hope you like them!

By the way, I owe a huge THANK YOU to everyone who has commented on my fics so far. You guys are amazing, not only for making me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, but for encouraging me to write more. I only hope that I can continue to please. :)

* * *

**Blue**

"Do you always see souls?" she asked him.

Kid risked looking up from Liz's outstretched hand to meet her eyes, once, briefly. Then he resumed his concentration on painting her fingernails with precise, even strokes of bright red polish. "I could, I think," he said as he worked. "But I don't like to. They're distracting." He frowned. "Too colorful, particularly in a roomful of people."

Liz was secretly amused, but not at all surprised, to hear Kid complaining about something being too colorful. He preferred the predictability and comfort of black and white. But she reached over with her other hand, touched his chin, and asked, "So what color is my soul?"

He tilted his head up to meet her eyes again. "A clear, pure blue." Then, "Most people have souls that match their eye colors, you know."

She raised one eyebrow at him. "Really? Are you sure?"

"I don't lie about souls. I would never."

She snorted. "I still find it hard to believe, though."

"Why?"

"I have a 'pure' soul? I mean, _really_? After all of the crap that I've done in my life? After all of the ugly, selfish, stupid, cruel, petty, vicious, crappy things I've done? After all of the bad decisions that I made? After how much I screwed up my own little sister? I don't have a pure soul, Kid. I can't. I'm not a pure person."

He was silent for a long moment. Then he looked back down at her fingernails again, and resumed his careful work painting them. He applied the polish in an even coating from the base to the tip of each nail, doing a much better job of it than most professional manicurists that Liz had ever offered her hands to. "You don't have to be a pure person," he said. "Nobody is. There's no such thing."

"Then how come you said that I have a pure soul?"

"Because you do."

"How does that even work?"

He frowned again. "I don't know." He shook his head, slightly, as if clearing his thoughts. He finished on her left hand, and reached for her right hand. Then he finally said, "I think... I think that the purest souls are the ones that are trying the hardest to do and be good. And that doesn't mean that they don't screw up or make mistakes. But--"

"Okay, zen-meister. You know that when we first met, I totally _wasn't_ trying to do or be good. Remember?"

"Believe me, I remember." A slight smile.

"So what color was my soul back then?"

He paused in his task of painting her nails long enough to massage a tightening knot out of the ball of her thumb. "Lots of colors," he said. "Every color but the demon-egg color."

"Huh? And what does that mean?"

"It means that you had a lot of conflicting desires."

"Oh, deep. Very deep. Thank you, Dr. Freud." She wriggled the fingers of her left hand, admiring the excellent job that he had done with her nails. "But you asked me and Patti to come with you anyway."

"I did."

"Because you're a desperate mental case who needed two guns?"

"Well, yes. But it wasn't just that and you know it wasn't just that." He seemed insulted at the suggestion. "Like I said, you had every color but the demon-egg color. Rouge weapons who prey on others, they normally don't last long before they start devouring souls and turning into demon eggs. But you two never did. So that's how I knew."

"Knew what?"

But he had apparently completely abandoned his train of thought, distracted by something that he'd spotted on her hands. "Oh, _wow_," he breathed. "You have the exact same curvature radius on the tips of every single one of your fingers. That's _amazing._" He pressed her hands together with his. "I mean, just look at that! They're perfectly symmetrical! Even the veins on the back of your hands are perfectly--"

"Okay, that's enough," Liz said, pulling her hands free of his grasp. "Thanks for the manicure, no thanks for the creepy new hand fetish."

"It's not new. You know I've always liked your hands."

Liz rolled her eyes and sighed. Hadn't they just been having a meaningful heart-to-heart about souls, and soul colors, and stuff?And then he had to ruin the moment by getting all obsessive about the veins on the back of her hands, all of a sudden. God, but he could be so weird sometimes.

* * *

**Yellow**

Patti loved the fact that his eyes were a rather unremarkable shade of yellow. Not _golden_, not _saffron_, not any of those other words that the poor little first-year technician had used in her misbegotten love letter to him. (Which of course Liz had stolen and read breathlessly to her sister, the two of them curled up beside him in bed and laughing all the while, because they were both still a little bit evil like that.) Nope, the color of his eyes was so unremarkable that it hardly deserved big, fancy words as descriptors. His eyes were yellow, period. End of story. Just plain yellow.

His eyes were the same color of yellow, incidentally, as the yellow crayons in Patti's many crayon boxes. The crayons labeled as _yellow_, that was. In the bigger boxes, there were crayons with fancy names like _goldenrod_ and _sunglow_ and _maize_, but none of those matched his eye color. There was always one crayon labeled just plain _yellow_, and that was always the crayon that matched his eyes.

It was a good color, though. Plain, but good. The perfect color to match the petals of a dandelion, or a canary's feathers, or the skin of a giraffe.

Sometimes she looked at his eyes, and thought of giraffes, and laughed. Then he would stare at her and ask "_What?_" with that grumpy face of his, and that made her laugh harder.

During class, when she wasn't busy sleeping, Patti would whip out her crayons and draw all over her notebooks - giraffes, mostly, but sometimes dandelions and canaries too. Maybe a yellow tang (that was a type of fish, not a drink, thank you very much stupid Liz), or a bright yellow hibiscus, sometimes thrown in to mix things up. Or sunflowers, or daffodils. Daffodils were really hard to draw, but over the years Patti had gotten quite good at it. In the end, however, she still preferred the simplicity of a giraffe. Just four legs, a long neck, and a funny-looking face. Plus splotches of brown that she could spatter on its body at her whim. Total chaos, those brown patches were. Either in real life or in her drawings, no two giraffes ever looked alike, and it was because of those wonderfully crazy brown patches. Totally asymmetrical.

Kid hated giraffes, by the way. Even though he had the right eyes for them.

But Patti didn't care about what he did or didn't like. He could be incredibly stupid about things like that, so it was best to ignore him when he would glance over at her giraffe drawings and then turn away in disgust. Whatever. Patti wasn't drawing for him, anyway. She was drawing for herself. So what if his eyes were her inspiration? That didn't mean that he was necessarily smart enough to appreciate the finished product. Patti could forgive him for that, though. It wasn't his fault that he had been born a stupidhead.

One time Maka had leaned over and looked at Patti's notebook and said, "You really like giraffes, don't you?"

"Yes," Patti had said. "They're my favorite."

But that hadn't always been true. She'd had lots of favorite animals over the years. Cats, and hamsters, and seahorses, and she had even gone through a brief gorilla phase. Patti used to not really care one way or the other about giraffes. But that changed after she met him.

Liz thought that Patti liked Kid's yellow eyes because they reminded her of giraffes. But Liz was wrong. It was the other way around. She liked giraffes because they reminded her of Kid's yellow eyes; and of the many strange and amusing yellow creatures that walked and swam and flew and grew all over the Earth, giraffes were definitely the most hilariously weird-looking, therefore officially the most _awesome._

Patti sometimes wondered why it had taken her so long to realize that. Maybe it was because plain, boring old yellow was a color that nobody ever seemed to really appreciate. Patti certainly hadn't much liked yellow, at least not until she had seen his eyes for the first time. Now she couldn't get enough of it. And she privately thought that it was such a shame, how much the rest of the world didn't seem to care for yellow. Liz didn't like yellow because it was too hard to match with the right eyeliner or the right shoes. Black Star had once told Patti that yellow was a _cowardly_ color. And even Soul, who had once upon a time dressed himself in a bright yellow jacket, had eventually thrown out said jacket upon overhearing some hipster musician ranting on television about how "uncool" of a color yellow was.

Idiots, all of them.

Patti had once been an idiot too, but once she'd finally taken notice of Kid's eyes, she'd learned to properly appreciate yellow. Now she had her giraffes and her canaries and her yellow tangs, her dandelions and her daffodils and her sunflowers, and all of these wonderful yellow things that were so _beautiful_ and that made her so _happy_, and it was all thanks to his eyes.


End file.
